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Tuesday, January 13, 2015

A female gamer talks about her involvement in #GamerGate

...The Gamergate controversy is the result of a combination of separate, yet related, issues. Firstly it is a call for ethical reform in the games press, primarily in the form of disclosure of either personal or financial conflicts of interest between a journalist and a subject they are reviewing or reporting on. Secondly, it is a response to ideological manipulation of the gaming industry, and the censorship that has occurred as a result of this. These two things are, in fact, related, because we are seeing the praise of this manipulation by members of the gaming press, as well as praise of the censorship of discussion by members of the gaming press. This combination of the lack of objectivity and fact checking with the desire to adjust or omit truths in order to appeal to a particular “group” is in no way exclusive to games journalists, but rather is indicative of a larger, more universal issue in how we all receive news...

...As a result of our push against the politicization of the industry, we were minimized to the singular demographic of “white cis male.”

#NotYourShield is a “sister hashtag” to #Gamergate, and was started as a response to this characterization that all gamers were white nerdy man-children. Female and minority gamers spoke out in support of both ethics and creative freedom, while also largely condemning both artistic and spoken censorship. We were met with accusations of being fake, or of internalizing our own self hatred - be it “internalized misogyny” or “internalized racism.” In addition, many of us have been called tokens, shields, gender traitors, and “uncle toms.”